The urbanization process in cities of developing countries is often insufficiently planned and poorly coordinated. Cities in developing countries are notorious for their inherent chaotic and discontinuous spatial patterns, as well as rapid and unorganized development processes. A specific kind of urban growth that happens in these cities is known as ‘peripherisation’. This type of urban expansion is something seen in many large cities in the developing world, and is particularly apparent in the city of Cairo.

Peripherisation can be defined as a kind of growth process characterized by the formation of low-income residential areas in the peripheral ring of the city. These areas are incorporated into the city by a long-term process of expansion by which numerous low-income areas are re-contextualized within the urban system and occupied by a higher economic group. The new low-income settlements continuously then emerge on the periphery. Peripherisation is an urban spatial problem, which has strong effects in social and economic terms, and is a problem unlikely to fade away without a well-informed planning action1.

As previously mentioned, Cairo has the same problem of peripherisation, but in a different manner. Along the ring road the highway that circles around the greater Cairo region Cairo is surrounded by informality. In the northern sector there are informal settlements or peri-urban areas, as David Sims refers to these areas in his attempt to understand the logic behind a city out of control2. This peri-urban frontier includes, according to Sims, nine, mainly rural, administrative marakiz (districts) of Giza and Qalyubiya governorates. The 2006 population of peri-urban Greater Cairo was 3.9 million inhabitants. These areas can be claimed to have a majority of poor inhabitants, although this is not exclusively exact.

According to Sims, “the main reason for the growing attraction of peri-urban areas can be said to relate to the array of affordable housing solutions that the mainly informal housing markets generate in these areas. Land accessibility and price are conducive to informal settlement creep and infill”2.

On the southern sector of the road lies a set of informal areas, which Sims refers to as the desert cities. These areas are mostly inhibited by middle and upper middle classes, and include the areas of Obour, New Cairo (including Rehab and Madinaty) and Shorouq. Business and politics have influenced the built environments in these areas greatly. Authorities responsible for land governance realized that selling larger chunks of land for developers (mostly coming from the Gulf region after the recession in 2008) will generate a greater amount of money quickly and easily. That is why most of these areas are composed mainly of gated communities attempting to be self-sufficient, and are thus completely isolated from the city. The remainder of this urban expansion includes a number of isolated residential private islands separated into another sector dedicated as a business district. It is needless to mention that both areas are almost dead at night increasing the security problem around the area.

Similar to the Latin American cities, the peripheral ring of Cairo consists mostly of low-income housing including large spontaneous settlements, which usually lack urban services of any kind. As such, Peripherisation clearly constitutes a social problem. However, it is not a problem only in the sense of the extreme social inequalities that appear in the city in a very concrete spatial form. Rather, the problem is the perpetuation of such a form in space and time and, in this sense, Peripherisation is a social problem of spatial order1.

Sources:

Barros, J. (2003).Simulating Urban Dynamics in Latin American Cities. London: University College London.

Sims, D. (2010). Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City out of Control. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Ahmad Borham is a practicing design architect and a teaching assistant in the American University and the Arab Academy of Science and Technology and other educational institutions in Cairo. He is also an independent researcher interested in the issue of resilience against change and transformation in the built environments.

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